Have you ever watched a movie that made such an impression on you that you couldn’t help but ponder the essential beauty of it for days? It doesn’t happen very often, so when it does you kind of feel your heart racing and your mind churning in a million directions all at once. That’s kind of what happened to me as I was watching this feature film called, “It Might Get Loud”…

Our mothers are our best friends and, sadly in some cases, our worst enemies. They were gone too soon and around too much. They were demure and they were obnoxious. They were our model in life and our reason to find a new path. No two stories are the same – and this one is no different.

Today is Cinco de Mayo. Of course, a common misconception is that this is the Mexican Independence Day. Well, that’s in September. May 5th is the commemoration of an underdog defeat of the French army in a town called Puebla. It would be a proud day for any fledgling nation. However, every year as it rolls around, I am more than a little uncomfortable with the holiday.

I was sitting on a bench inside my university’s health and fitness building, the Maggs Center, letting my dreadlocks dry after a swimming class. This is my custom on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. On this particular Wednesday as I sat reading a Fitzgerald short story for the next class, my waterlogged locks dripping on my back, a young lady sat down on the other end of the bench apparently waiting for her class to begin. She was Muslim; she wore long gym pants, a long-sleeve Adidas shirt, eyeglasses, and a black hijab…

There he was just standing there with his arms crossed; he was staring into the space in front of him. A passing patron might confuse his look with that of someone going through spring cleaning or maybe just someone reorganizing and trying to figure out what to do next. But it was at that moment that I too stopped. I spent the afternoon trying to be helpful suggesting things that he could do to make moving these boxes easier. It didn’t dawn on me that as he was looking at the boxes in front of him that I wasn’t seeing what he saw. It was at that moment that I finally did. My father was staring at 30 years of working as a locksmith coming to an end. It’s strange to look at one’s life’s work and have it amount to a few boxes and a surplus of a few thousand uncut key blanks. I’m sure that was what he was thinking too.

A few weeks ago four guys got together trying to make sense of this mess we call life. A gathering of men brought together to discuss the deeper issues of our faith extracted from the contents of an ancient book and all within the context of this place and time. Sound complicated? It has been. The questions we all brought to the table were intended to challenge us to make a difference in the world – even a small one. Could we find the holy in the unholy, extract joy from tragedy and find faith in the midst of our own cynicism? Those were some of the questions brought to the table because at some point we had all come to the conclusion that religion, at least the way it was packaged to us in our youth, sucked.

For a good deal of one’s early life it’s easy to consider that you might just live forever. This is especially true if you’ve not been touched by death very often. But, inevitably, one grows older and starts to notice that, physically speaking, some things just can’t be accomplished as easily as they once could. Your own parents, who you assumed would always be a part of your life, don’t look quite as sturdy as they once did, and you begin to understand a universal truth… people don’t live forever.

This understanding became abundantly clear to me one day in December of last year.

When the clock strikes midnight, the ball drops, and the cyborg formerly known as Dick Clark announces the new year I always, without fail, hear the little voice that says, “This next year is going to be a good one.” And I believe it. I have to believe it.

We live in strange times. While we have more ways and opportunities to communicate than ever before, we are more lonely and less communal than ever before. The technologies that promise closeness instead drive us further from one another. We live in over-crowded and polluted cities — often far away from our families — where we do not even know our neighbors.

This is the story of a girl with two dads – but what you are about to read is no sitcom plot. The first of these men was out of the picture by the time I was three, although he was hardly present before then; the second came into my life later that same year, and, by the time I was six, his pathological anger had forever shaped the person I would become.